Why does Windows not see all devices on a SAS expander but Linux does?

[lamune]

Test subject is a Supermicro H11SSL-NC board with an EPYC 7402P processor. LSI SAS3008 controller, and an OEM Intel/Lenovo/HP 12G SAS expander (I've tried all three) which is the Adaptec AEC-82885T under the hood. The HBA is plugged into G and H as per the Intel datasheet, I have A-D going to internal backplanes and two tape drives plugged into the external ports. All the drives are 6G SATA.

If I boot a Linux distro, all the drives and both tape drives show up.

In the UEFI BIOS config utility for the HBA, I see all the drives also

When booted into Windows Server 2022, half the drives and one tape drive are seen by the OS.

When booted into Windows Server 2025, all but one drive show up, and still only one tape drive.

Does anyone know why this happens, and if there's any way to get all the devices to show up in Windows?

 

[MountainBofh]

device driver issue? Might be worth installing the newest driver.

Broadcom Inc. | Connecting Everything

docs.broadcom.com

 

[CyklonDX]

Are you sure they aren't showing up in hardware? Maybe they have partitions/logical disks windows don't like?
*(check in device manager)

 

[BLinux]

Have you looked through the Windows system event logs?

 

[lamune]

So after some more debugging- Drivers are "current" - the SAS3008 drivers haven't been updated since the P16 set in 2020. The drivers MountainBOFH is pointing to are for newer chips than the 3008.

The missing drive turned out to be a cabling problem apparently. I recabled everything and that went away.

The tape drive issue however persists, and it's not the a problem with the expander because I can repro the issue now directly attached. The TL;DR is is that I can plug in either one of the drives, and it will show up in device mangler, but when I plug in both one will disappear.

In any case I think if this is a driver problem, I'm SOL because there hasn't been an update in 5 years and I wouldn't expect any going forward.

 

[lamune]

This is interesting if anyone's curious. I found a second-gen LSI SAS card, A 9207-8e. I plugged that in and cabled it up, and the tape library and drives appear as they should. Seems like a driver problem with the 3008 which is unfortunate as these are very commonly embedded on server boards and again I don't think it'll ever get a fix.

 

[BLinux]

This is interesting if anyone's curious. I found a second-gen LSI SAS card, A 9207-8e. I plugged that in and cabled it up, and the tape library and drives appear as they should. Seems like a driver problem with the 3008 which is unfortunate as these are very commonly embedded on server boards and again I don't think it'll ever get a fix.

That does sound unfortunate. But I appreciate that you followed up.

 

[lamune]

And I guess the final note here, I swapped out the 9300 series HBA with a 9400 series and the tape library works now. Though not through the expander. Something is still weird with Windows and that SAS expander. Directly connected it works fine, and I can live with that.